Saturday, August 21, 2010

Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino is a poem concerning the rural Acholi woman Lawino’s tribulations as her husband, Ocol, has turned ‘western’ and looks down upon his roots. Lawino, the defender of her people’s virtues and values, laments her husband’s modern ways of living, but his degrading reply is to be found in the book from 1970, Song of Ocol, where he mocks her defence.

Then why do they not join hands,Why do they split up the armyInto two hostile groups?The spears of the young menAnd their shields,Why are the weaponsAnd the men and womenDispersed so uselessly?

And while the pythons of sicknessSwallow the childrenAnd the buffalos of povertyKnock the people downAnd ignorance stands thereLike an elephant,

The war leadersAre tightly locked in bloody feuds,Eating each other’s liverAs if the D.P. was leprosyAnd the Congress yaws;

If only the partiesWould fight povertyWith the furyWith which they fight each other,If diseases and ignoranceWere assaultedWith the deadly vengeanceWith which Ocol assaults his mother’s son,The enemies would have beenGreatly reduced by now.

Okot p'Bitek was born in 1932 in Gulu, Northern Uganda to Acholi parents. He began writing in his mother tongue Lwo, one of the Western Nilotic languages, subsequently his works White Teeth and Song of Lawino were translated into English.p'Bitek passed away on July 20, 1982.

The quote of the month

"Knowing the benefits that have resulted to this country from the Slave Trade, I think it would have been advisable to institute rather than abolish such a Trade; for I know that if it had not been for that Trade, this country would never have been in its present independent situation."